
Husband/Dad, CEO @SportsVisioAI, GP @10XVP Founded/sold Siege Technologies, former @DARPA PM and hacker Jsyversen on LinkedIn & Bluesky
Dunbarton, NH
Joined August 2009
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Was interviewed by a local media source when I was speaking at the Rally conference. This was a clip where I talked about the number one factor in entrepreneurial success.
It's truly crazy to me how bad people are at considering/describing competitive landscape. This is true for founders describing their business, VCs raising from LPs, people dating, non profits raising money.
Every single case needs to not think about "us or nobody" but rather... "me/us versus the alternative/opportunity cost"! Every time.
If you're dating, your prospective partner isn't considering "lifetime of loneliness, or this person"... they're thinking "where does this person fit into the range of possible partners, and is this a good person for me short/long term?"
An LP evaluating a VC isn't saying "do I want exposure to VC, and give this person a check"... but rather "of the money I have available for illiquid alternative asset classes, what percentage would I want to allocate to this GP? What better options exist?"
And yet I see time and time and time again people making decisions to found a company in a vacuum (they see a problem (one company without that tech) and assume THEY should go build it and sell it... instead of analyzing who else is in market, what the landscape looks like,why THEY uniquely should build it, etc. I could go on and on... don't do this! Any time you're making an important life decision or allocation decision analyze the heck out of the alternatives to have a chance at picking a strong/optimal outcome.
These stories should be shared more widely. Unfortunately survivorship bias has large companies teaching startups you should raise raise raise and never sell.
But for every FB or Anthropic there are thousands of stories like Foursquare.
Raise the minimum amount needed. Think about your exit strategy. (You personally and the firm, what are the short and long term goals for both, and does that match the market and reality?)
Building a business without excess capital that shows fiscal constraint and understand of unit economics Gives you optionally to build a long term business OR a strong exit. Too many founders (especially in the valley) forgot about that.
Foursquare raised $411 million in funding according to PitchBook data, but its equity holders saw no returns from its final acquisition.
spr.ly/6019BHnV8z
Fascinating to see Anthropic and SpaceX offering free equity positions to the public. Had that ever happened in the history of the stock market? (For real, successful, growing firms?)
One challenge will be stock buy backs. Currently firms do that to optimize taxes. But if you’re low income you want that stock throwing off cash, not just growing in value while you watch it.
Interesting way to help the public benefit from these companies while cutting out the horribly run middle man (Federal government!)
it'd be interesting if si produced some sort of an economy where private corporations become the primary financiers of social welfare (aka universal high income) rather than governments. i know indirectly this is what happens through taxes but imagine it working directly in some fashion (likely through ownership, growth, & some form of liquidity).
the reason why is because it's pretty clear now that si will create super power law outcomes for almost all of society. & more specifically current mechanics for income redistribution like income taxes will become way less effective over time too since the income gaps will continue to increase drastically (see sf & its housing market as an early example of this).
basically some form universal equity ownership as an intermediate step before full automation occurs. fun to think about all of the implications of this.
Love this stuff. Debated doing a company in this space instead of SportsVisio but wasn’t convinced that the big publishers cared enough to invest (or the TAM being big enough). But super fun problem, cutting edge tech and domain.
This is why the anti-cheat arms race is getting so interesting.
Riot is pushing Vanguard further into hardware-backed trust, attestation, VBS/HVCI, IOMMU and deeper platform security.
At the same time, AI-assisted reverse engineering is making it much faster to tear apart the software sitting on top of those protections.
@k0mkc is showing heavily devirtualized VGK internals and says he can now devirtualize the entire thing.
On the EAC side, @in19h has published tooling that recovers large parts of a heavily virtualized Easy Anti-Cheat Linux sample into readable code and IDA artifacts:
github.com/19h/eac-linux-dev…
There is an important parallel here with EDR.
An EDR is only as effective as the detection engineering, threat hunting and R&D behind it. Anti-cheat works the same way.
You need researchers constantly following new techniques, detection engineers turning that research into useful telemetry and detections, and people actively hunting for behaviour that existing rules may miss.
That means continuously keeping up with:
- new cheat architectures
- kernel abuse
- BYOVD
- hypervisors
- DMA
- firmware tricks
- input manipulation
- virtualization + obfuscation
- new bypass techniques
The game was already there. AI is speeding it up and lowering the barrier to reversing, classification, devirtualization and research.
That forces both sides to iterate faster.
A lot of respect to the Vanguard team as well. They have clearly been keeping up with some of the most cutting-edge work in Windows security, hardware-backed trust, kernel security and anti-cheat research, and their recent Vanguard On-Demand changes show how quickly the defensive side is evolving too.
This is becoming a much faster research cycle on both sides.
Where does the arms race go next?
Huge credit to @k0mkc and @in19h for the research.
#AntiCheat #ReverseEngineering #WindowsInternals
Ben Horowitz says Anthropic is one of the most negligent companies he’s ever seen on security
"The irony on these things is wild. Anthropic is one of the most negligent companies that we've ever seen in terms of their own security."
"They let Claude code, one of their crown jewels, just like walk out the door because they had such bad OPSEC."
"I'll tell you a funny story. So when we first got Opus 4.5, we were doing cybersecurity checks for the firm. So we had an agent basically set up a website for a pet store. And then we took another agent and said, 'Tell us if we can exploit that web store.' And it gave us all the exploits it could find. So Opus 4.5 wrote really buggy code. Great."
"And then we said, 'Oh, the SQL injection you found, is that actually exploitable?' And it goes, 'Let's pop it open.' And the agent using Opus 4.5 breaks into the website and steals all the [data], and we call Anthropic. And what they tell us is, 'You prompted it wrong.' That was their answer."
"So these guys are doing that on the one hand. And then on the other hand, they're coming up with theoretical scenarios about other people's software. That's bad. And so like, what the hell."
"On the distillation thing, you know, to build their model, they distilled the works of every author, every creative, every scientist for the last 2000 years. For them to be complaining about distillation, which, by the way, distilling a model is not even illegal. It's just a violation of the terms of service."
"It's just so much. And the fact that they get people to write things supporting these bananas, ridiculous, two-faced ideas. And the timing here is very suspicious."
This made me LoL 😆
Tiger Woods Unimpressed With Roadster As He's Flipped Dozens Of Vehicles buff.ly/dUGarJ0
Not gonna lie but this is a freakin’ cool demo. Probably meaningless because this isn’t street legal or even available to buy. But it is cool which counts for something.
Nice to keep seeing stuff built that makes you feel like we actually are finally living in the future we envisioned as kids. Walking around SF I captured this row of self driving Waymo’s in a line. It’s arriving!
Honestly I think this is why most startups run circles around big companies. Not because the big companies lack resources (smart people, plenty of money, distribution). But because they have so many committees and can't get out of their own way.
We just landed a large customer (solid 9 digit annual revenue) and it's shocking the amount of meetings to have meetings with 5-10 people in each to make a decision. Roll out plans are in months/quarters, not days or weeks like we would normally move on.
Our (and every other small firm's) biggest challenge as we grow is figuring out how to stay lean as a company and make decisions quickly (like SpaceX, which is not a small company these days).
A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life.
At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday."
He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy.
Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system.
He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting.
He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way."
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
Love this story. Honestly stuff like this is why we built @SportsVisioAI You shouldn’t need to stay up late hand doing charts. You shouldn’t need a dedicated staffer pouring over data to understand what happened. (Computers are good at that!)
It’s about removing the manual labor parts and democratizing access to the cool insights. (And giving kids all their clips too!)
My son tried out for his high school basketball team three years in a row and got cut every time. He's a good kid, but he's five foot six and not very fast, and the third time it broke his heart. He'd practiced every single day that summer. He came home from the final cut list and went straight to his room. The next morning, the coach called our house and asked to talk to him. He said he had a problem.
Gary doesn’t mention year two. Even if you got the loan for 50% of your shares (which you now don’t own), by year two you’d have to borrow another gigantic amount. You’re now worth more dead than alive!
The academics think the founder who raised at $2B valuation can pay but they can’t
You are a founder who owns 50% of your company and you have 20x voting rights. You owe 5% on $10B in the asset seizure tax. You owe $500M of your paper $1B. Find me a way to get a loan for half your illiquid net worth. You cant.
The asset seizure proponents are dishonest and also it’s not a 5% tax on startups. It’s a 50% tax in this simple case.
Jason Syversen retweeted
what an awful thing to surprise someone with
WWE's John Cena surprises Make-A-Wish 7-year-old with cancer trib.al/SxX9dAm
Loved this story. One of my favorite Twitter memories was way back (when that’s what it was called) I met a CyberCommand very senior officer in his classified offices for the first time. He said I was “part of the cyber glitterati” (I wasn’t even sure what that meant, but found out it was good!) and he’d been following me from a secret account. Made the rest of the meeting very easy.
You never know who’s following your journey and what you post and share. Keep doing good work and building public and being kind and you’ll be surprised at the dividends down the road.
i recently met a wildly successful founder who had exited for an enormous amount of money & whom i admired cuz he’d dm’ed me saying he loved my writing.
i never knew cuz he’d never liked, replied to, or interacted with a single post of mine. i had absolutely no idea he was even reading, & strangely never even followed.
just goes to show you the feedback loops on x are incredibly lossy. you have no idea who’s consuming your thoughts, who you’re impacting, or who absolutely despises everything you say.
your visible audience & your actual audience are two very very different things.
Lots of drama around Valar Atomics and Day One Ventures.
Given all this bad stuff (which was known back in 2022 apparently) I am surprised they took funding from them at all.
turns out that Masha Bucher, founder of Day One Ventures. Also known for ..
- being a member of the Kremlin Youth
- a PR manager for Jeffery Epstein
- starting a VC fund whose first investor is a (now sanctioned) Russian Bank's founder
- a FBI report where a confidential source reported "Day One Ventures was in Silicon Valley to steal technology.”
is not the best VC to work with.
Jason Syversen retweeted
Tao is completely missing the mark - what he's describing is actually completely standard for drug discovery. There are tons of drugs that have saved millions of lives without any person on Earth understanding fully the mechanisms of action that enabled them to do this.
Love this idea. I suspect this is something we’ll see more in the future. Building games to illustrate a specific concept. It’s a clever way to leverage AI to quickly put something together that’s engaging and educational at the same time. Could do many topics (cooking, VC, Palestine, marriage, whatever)
Crazy times we are in now. Non hackers can just use AI to decompile binaries or just feature reconstruction them and then port to whatever they want and add whatever they want. In days. Without anyone else assisting. 🤯
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